On Location - From Bard To Verse

03 December 08

Writer Quentin Falk visited the set of A Bunch Of Amateurs to see how they recreated Hollywood in South Bucks.

As the rain lashes outside the orangery at Danesfield House, a huge, castellated country house hotel perched high above a corner of the Thames in South Bucks, you’d be hard pressed to think ‘Beverly Hills’.

However, with some big lights strategically placed to simulate sunny Southern California, at least the illusion of West Coast warmth is craftily compounded. To complete the deception, sitting at the centre of this filmmaking tableau are two of Hollywood’s authentic veteran royalty, 72-year-old Burt Reynolds and Charles
Durning, 85.

More than 6000 miles from their spiritual home, the two old actors are enjoying a spirited lunchtime exchange, facilitated by the odd cue card, as part of A Bunch Of Amateurs, a new British comedy of Anglo-American cultural confusion.

Chosen as the Royal Film in aid of the CTBF in November, and due to open before Christmas, it’s the latest production from David Parfitt, also recently installed as BAFTA’s latest Chair.

I think the US has TV comedy down, but there is a subtleness, a self-deprecation, to British film comedy that I love

Reynolds plays fading Hollywood legend Jefferson Steel, who thinks he’s been invited to star as Shakespeare’s tragic monarch King Lear at Stratford. What we and, in the film, the world’s press know from the outset – but he doesn’t even remotely comprehend – is that the invitation has actually come from a humble am-dram
company in Stratford St John, Suffolk.

Of course, Parfitt knows a thing or two about tweaking the Bard for today’s cinema audience. After all, his 1998 comedy Shakespeare In Love snared a total of no fewer than 10 Academy Awards on both sides of the Atlantic.

The idea for the film was first brought to Parfitt’s attention around seven years ago: “I didn’t really go for the script [by Jonathan Gershfield and John Ross] in that form, but the treatment was really interesting and I thought it was a fantastic idea. We agreed to work together for a year, to bounce ideas around and see whether we could come up with a script that started to go in a direction that could work.

“After about a year I thought we’d gone about as far as we could as a team. We’d got a decent script but I really thought it could move on to the next stage, so we started looking around for someone who was prepared to take on not too radical a re-write.”

Enter Ian Hislop and Nick Newman. Said Parfitt: “It’s amazing to think, but there aren’t that many comedy writers in the UK prepared to work with other peoples’ material and so I had a conversation with Ian and Nick, who I’ve known for a long, long time and asked them to have a look at the script to see if they felt they could bring something extra and they leapt at it. Their first revision was a respectful pass, and as we progressed, things got a little bit more radical.”

Director Andy Cadiff was involved in the project even before Hislop and Newman came on board. Parfitt and Cadiff – who has hours of American TV sitcom like Spin City and The War At Home under his belt – first met when they worked together on Chasing Liberty in 2004 and shared the idea in the edit suite.

Cadiff added: “I’m a big fan of British comedy, which I think is why I was also drawn to the project. I think the US has TV comedy down, but there is a subtleness, a self-deprecation, to British film comedy that I love. The story of Jefferson Steel is a
‘fish out of water’ tale, which is why I enjoyed bringing an American sensibility to the director’s role too.”

A Bunch Of Amateurs, co-starring Samantha Bond, Sir Derek Jacobi and Imelda Staunton, as well as Durning as Reynolds’ dotty old agent, is also the latest in a long line of films – more recently Miss Potter, The Cottage, Me And Orson Welles and Wild Target – since the mid ‘90s to go the Isle of Man route.

Its Media Development Fund, now run by CinemaNX, claims to offer between 10% and 100% of a project’s budget in exchange for, among other things, at least 50% of principal photography on the island.

Not however, you would think, the natural habitat for Burt Reynolds, whose 40-year screen career has often embraced the Great American Outdoors in everything from Deliverance and The Cannonball Run to Smokey And The Bandit and The Best Little
Whorehouse In Texas.

The role was not written with a specific actor in mind, but Parfitt does recall discussing with Cadiff who, in a perfect world, they’d like to play Steel – and came up with a mixture of Harrison Ford, Michael Douglas and Burt Reynolds, above all, definitely someone who was willing to laugh at themselves and the whole Hollywood system.

Says Cadiff: “What I loved about our meetings with Burt was, to coin a British phrase, he was ready to take the piss out of himself. He knows in terms of his own career what it’s like to be number one, then to a certain extent discarded by the industry, and then elevated again as he was with Boogie Nights. “If he didn’t have a sense of humour about his journey through Hollywood and stardom, he could never have embraced a role like this.”